iTunes Match

Lindsay Lohan

Quick question. I'm realizing more and more that my digital music collection is a complete mess. The majority of it are tracks I ripped myself, many in a lower bitrate than I'd want now and I'm too lazy to rerip every cd I own again. Some of them came from my college days and frankly may be questionable as I did have a stint using one of those weird russian sites. Some of them come from amazon mp3 purchases. I'm finding more and more mislabelled stuff or albums with such bad compression they sound terrible.

Obviously iTunes match seems like a good solution to get this all cleaned up but I had a few questions...

First, is there a way to use iTunes to get tracks onto my Android phone and will my phone even place whatever format Apple converts them to. I know I can't stream to the phone, just wanting to manage it's music from there.

Second, can I go to my desktop, run Match to put stuff into the magic Apple cloud and then do it again from my laptop to find any tracks that are only on that computer?

Finally, can I then install iTunes on all 4 of our pc's, have them all share that common library and synch any of our iPods to any PC in the house with no issues?

EggyToast

iTunes Match will help you get high-quality files for stuff you already have, assuming that iTunes can match your existing library. If you have a lot of bad tags and music from random rips, iTunes may not be able to match it, which means it would simply copy from your existing library. So, it will fix the poor quality issue, but not the tagging issue, and only files with good enough tags will be fixed.

Secondly, iTunes Match will only stream to desktop computers running iTunes (registered as yours) and to iOS devices. You can download matched songs, although my understanding is that this is one-at-at-time. Once they're downloaded again, I assume you can transfer them over to your Android phone, right? Can you do that now? They use AAC formatting, which is an option if you have iTunes convert your CDs.

It should work across multiple computers, since it won't know where you're adding content from. As for sharing, you will have a "cloud" but not a common library, other than the cloud. The syncing thing won't happen with your iPods, though, unless they're running iOS and can access the cloud -- otherwise they'll interact only with that specific iTunes and the physical songs on that computer. You can also set up "family sharing" within iTunes to set one computer as essentially the "master" and then just stream directly to your other computers, ignoring the cloud aspect.

For the tagging issue by itself, you can look at TuneUp.com and their Biz Markie commercials. Also, are you near an Apple store? Your specific setup and questions may be good for their Genius Bar.